Ted Sorensen, who died a week ago, was the strategist and political speech writer behind John F. Kennedy in his successful campaign for the American presidency in 1960 — a triumph that owed much to Sorensen’s book publisher talents as a phrasemaker, and one that set the standard for modern oratory.
Sorensen’s 14-minute inaugural address for Kennedy famously called for self-sacrifice and civic engagement — “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” — and promised to spare no cost in defending American interests worldwide.
Among Kennedy’s inner circle working in the West Wing of the White House, Sorensen (as special counsel) was the youngest, but he ranked just below the president’s brother Bobby. Such was the closeness of Sorensen’s collaboration with JFK on some of his most memorable speeches that no one was quite certain who wrote what.
The glamorous, wealthy politician from Massachusetts and his diffident aide from the Midwest made an odd but compatible pair. In 1960 Time magazine described Sorensen as “a sober, deadly earnest, self-effacing man with a blue steel brain.” But, as Sorensen himself noted, both he and Kennedy had a wry sense of humour, a dislike of hypocrisy, a love of books and a high-minded regard for public life.
In October 1962, Sorensen applied himself to the growing crisis in Cuba, as the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war over Soviet missiles sited there.
Kennedy ordered Sorensen and Bobby Kennedy, the administration’s attorney general, to draft a letter to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who had sent a series of conflicting messages, first conciliatory, then belligerent.
Their carefully worded response — which ignored Khrushchev’s harsher statements and offered a concession involving American weapons in Turkey — was critical in persuading the Soviets to withdraw their missiles from Cuba, averting war between the superpowers. Sorensen considered this his greatest achievement.
Although acclaimed as “the poet of Camelot” (as the Kennedy administration was known), Sorensen never claimed exclusive authorship of these rolling cadences, describing speechwriting within Kennedy’s White House as highly collaborative — with JFK a constant source of suggestions of his own.
Theodore Chaikin Sorensen was born into what he called a Danish-Russian-Jewish Unitarian family on May 8, 1928 in Lincoln, Nebraska, where his father was a progressive Republican state attorney general. After graduating from Lincoln High School in 1945, he studied law at the University of Nebraska.
In 1952, when he was 24, he joined Kennedy’s staff. The newly elected senator for Massachusetts reportedly gave Sorensen two short interviews a day or two apart before hiring him. The pair hit it off immediately.
In January 1960, Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination and, with Sorensen, went on to wage one of the most successful political campaigns in American history.
Sorensen thrived on pressure and, as Kennedy was delivering one speech, he would often be found writing the next. As “chief of staff for ideas,” Sorensen became one of the most prominent and influential figures in the political landscape during JFK’s brief presidency.
After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Sorensen worked as an international lawyer, and numbered the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat among his clients. He remained involved in book publishing, politics, joining Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968 and running unsuccessfully for the
Random House Inc., the world’s largest consumer book publisher, is seeking to sublease as many as nine of the 24 floors it now occupies at 1745 Broadway, in a sign that the city’s office market is still facing choppy waters.
Random House, a unit of Bertelsmann AG, held a cocktail reception Wednesday for real-estate brokers to discuss its plans to unload as much as 250,000 of 645,000 square feet it occupies in its headquarters building. The publisher, which used to own the building, has a long-term lease.
“The potential savings is in the millions of dollars,” says Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House Book Publishers. “We’re in the book business, not the real-estate business. We’ll reinvest our savings into our publishing.”
Random House has selected the brokerage firm Cassidy Turley to market the space. The asking rent is $55 a square foot.
Mr. Applebaum says that Random House currently has a 30% vacancy rate on its floors. Many book publishers, including Random House, have had to lay off staffers in the past few years because of the poor economy and its impact on book sales. Mr. Applebaum notes that Random House now has too much non-productive space for the publisher to ignore.
He emphasizes that Random House’s decision to reduce its floor count isn’t an indicator that it is planning further major staff reductions.
“We have well over 1,000 people employed here,” he says. “This is about redesigning our work space for our staff, not for reducing it.”
Bertelsmann in 2003 sold 1745 Broadway to a real-estate fund managed by Jamestown. In 2007, the property was sold to a venture of SL Green Realty Corp., the Witkoff Group and a subsidiary of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec.
Mr. Applebaum said the book publishing company intends to keep its cafeteria on the second floor. He said that it is likely that Random House will sublease from the top on down, beginning with the senior corporate executive floor on 25.
Win or lose at the Scotiabank Giller Prize on Nov. 9,it will be business as usual at Gaspereau Press.
For the first time in its 13-year history, the small, Kentville, N.S. book publishers and printing business has a book in the running for Canada’s most prestigious literary award, Johanna Skibsrud’s debut novel The Sentimentalists.
About 800 copies of the book were printed when it was first published a year ago; roughly half sold prior to the novel’s unexpected appearance on the Giller longlist at the end of September. The remaining copies were gobbled up by the time the title made the five-book shortlist in early October. Since then, Gaspereau’s five-person operation has been printing about 1,000 copies a week — the maximum it can handle, given other demands and book publisher responsibilities.
“Whether we win or lose, I’ll continue to make about 1,000 books a week, as long as there is a demand,” says co-owner Andrew Steeves, who runs the business with partner Gary Dunfield.
“One of the problems is that you can’t just drop everything else you do. We’re a local print shop. Long after the Giller goes away, I’ve got other clients. I can’t afford to alienate them. So I have to balance all that stuff.”
This is not remotely the way it will go down if any of the other four publishers with a book in the hunt cashes in.
The Giller, in addition to rewarding the winning author with a cheque for $50,000, is an instant boon to sales. Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man, the most recent beneficiary of what is commonly known in the book publishers industry as the “Giller Effect,” moved 75,000 hardcover copies after winning last year and continues to sell well in paperback.
Publishers are ready to capitalize, sometimes within minutes of the announcement of the winner just before 10 p.m. at the gala’s live telecast.
Windsor’s small Biblioasis, which also has never produced a previous Giller finalist, already has a plan to print as many as 25,000 additional copies of Alexander MacLeod’s debut short story collection Light Lifting.
“As I understand it we won’t even have to call the printers, if against all odds we win,” says publisher Dan Wells. “They’ll be watching at the same time and when it’s announced, they can flick a switch and start printing.”
House of Anansi, a mid-sized Toronto publisher, has produced seven Giller finalists but no winners. The company hasn’t settled on a firm number yet for Kathleen Winter’s Annabel, the only book this year to also be nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award, but president Sarah MacLachlan expects to order a print run of 40,000 copies, if the book wins.
“You talk to basically everybody that would sell a Giller book — the wholesalers, the chain, the independents — and you ask them what they think they will go through,” MacLachlan says.
“We are making a calculated decision. We’re not doing it because that looks like the right number in our heads. Historically, the repercussions have been big, so we’re like lawyers: We work on precedent.”
HarperCollins Canada, a rarity this year as the lone multi-national subsidiary in the mix, will undertake a similar reckoning in the event that David Bergen’s The Matter with Morris takes the prize.
The decision on how many copies to print will be made early Wednesday morning, but company sales and marketing vice-president Leo MacDonald anticipates something on the order last year’s Man Booker winner, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which sold 40,000 copies in Canada. The company’s previous Giller wins came in 2001 with Richard
Stolen Law Books from Ohio State University netted $20,000 online, authorities and book publishers report
A law student in his second year of the three-year program at Ohio State University is believed to have stolen books from the school.
Not just any books; they were law books. Campus police say he took more than 200, one at a time, from the university law library and sold them online for more than $20,000.
OSU police searched the student’s apartment last week. The Dispatch is not naming the student because he has not been charged. Police say they will seek an indictment soon.
Officers had been tracking the thefts since the beginning of August, when the university got an e-mail from a Brazilian lawyer. She said that she had bought a volume online from the “Orion Bookstore” site on Amazon.com and found a crossed-out OSU ink stamp on its inside front cover, according to court documents.
A quick check confirmed that the title had vanished from the shelves. An investigation led police to the student, who had 1,351 more library books listed for sale.
“I haven’t seen anything like this before,” said OSU police detective Pete Dragonette, who is leading the investigation.
Book thieves usually go after antique volumes, not common titles, said Scott Seaman, dean of Ohio University’s library. An OSU library official said he couldn’t comment because the investigation is continuing.
In 1996, a retired OSU art-history professor was sentenced to 14 months in federal prison for stealing 14th-century documents and other rare manuscripts from the Vatican Library over 30 years. Kenyon College’s library was a target about 10 years ago, when a night librarian and his girlfriend stole more than 200 books and papers dating back centuries and sold them on eBay for thousands of dollars.
New technology, with improved alarms and digital ID tags, helps security, but thefts can be difficult to prevent in collections of several million volumes typical at universities, Seaman said.
It’s more difficult to prove the source of a common book, which can be bought at many regular bookstores and book publisher stores. At Ohio State, police used a sting operation, marked merchandise and a hidden camera.
They found that one of the books listed for sale on the website was still in the law library. They marked an inside page with invisible ink that shows up under ultraviolet light and hid a camera in a nearby wall clock, according to court documents.
Then, one of the investigators had a relative out of state buy the book. The video shows a man they believe to be the student taking the marked book from the shelf. It later turned up at the buyer’s address – complete with the mark.
However, the toughest part is determining that a book is gone, librarians said. As in the OSU case, Kenyon didn’t notice the theft until a collector called to report that a particularly rare volume was for sale.
“Conscientious buyers are the best friends we have when catching stolen books,” said Joseph Murphy, director of information services at Kenyon’s library.
By: executivepublisher,
on 10/22/2010
Blog:
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers Blog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
book publishing,
Random House,
Self Publishing,
Salman Rushdie,
book publishing industry,
Random House Canada,
book publishing news,
Book Publishers,
Schiel & Denver Authors,
Schiel And Denver,
book publishing companies,
book publishing company,
Random House India,
Add a tag
Random House Book Publishers has acquired the multi-language rights to publish a memoir by Salman Rushdie in each of its territories across the world.
Markus Dohle, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Random House Book Publishers worldwide, announced the acquisition of hardcover, paperback, audio, and e-book rights for English- German- and Spanish-language editions of the work-in-progress from Andrew Wylie, President of The Wylie Agency, the author’s agent.
Rushdie expects to complete his manuscript by the end of next year for publication by Random House in 2012.
Dohle brought together the book publishing and editorial leadership from each of the company’s international divisions for this acquisition, which is unprecedented in scope for the world’s largest trade book publisher.
Random House is planning a simultaneous publication of the memoir in each of its territories in physical, digital and audio formats.
‘This extraordinary work merits an extraordinary publishing effort on our part,’ said Mr Dohle.
‘It offers Random House, on behalf of one of the world’s great writers, the opportunity to harness our tremendous international creative and logistic capabilities, which will support the focused, customized publishing campaigns each of our publishers will execute locally.’
Random House will publish the memoir in India, the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, in English; Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, in German; and Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, and Uruguay, in Spanish.
The Random House and Knopf Canada imprints are the respective US and Canadian publishers.
In the UK, the book will be published by the Random House UK imprint Jonathan Cape; in Germany, by the Verlagsgruppe Random House imprint C Bertelsmann; and in Spain and Latin America, by Random House Mondadori’s Literatura Mondadori.
Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most revered and honoured writers.
His memoir will be an evocation of his public and personal life: his outsider’s experience at British public school and Cambridge; his evolution as a writer; his relationships as a husband and a father; and his years in hiding following the fatwah issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.
Rushdie currently is working on the film version of his classic novel Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981.
Chiki Sarkar, editor-in-chief of Random House India, said, ‘I and the entire team at Random House India are delighted to be self-publishing Salman Rushdie’s memoirs and welcoming him to Random House India. We believe it will be a truly important book of a pivotal moment, and one of the great books on the act of writing.’
Rushdie observed, ‘I’m absolutely delighted that Random House, my longtime book publishers, has agreed to publish my memoir in the English-language world, as well as in Spanish, and for the first time in German. I couldn’t wish for a better home for my work. I have waited a long time to write this memoir, until I felt I was ready to do it. I’m ready now.’
Rushdie’s latest work of fiction, Luka and the Fire of Life, has just been released in India on October 15th. Dohle added, ‘It is a privilege for Random House to publish a book of this remarkable memoir by Salman Rushdie, whose courage and commitment to freedom of expression is matched only by his uns
By: executivepublisher,
on 10/16/2010
Blog:
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers Blog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
books,
book publishing,
Bloomsbury,
Man Booker Prize,
book publishing industry,
children's book publishers,
electronic publishing,
Book Publishers,
book publishing companies,
book publishing company,
Add a tag
Book publisher Bloomsbury has hailed “resilient” second half trading as it toasts the success of this week’s Man Booker Prize for Howard Jacobson’s novel The Finkler Question.
Bloomsbury said the win was helping the book gain increasing worldwide fame, while it is also seeing popularity soar for Eat, Love and Pray by Elizabeth Gilbert following the release of the film version featuring Julia Roberts.
The group outlined a strong second half line-up that it expects will help offset a 48% fall in profits during the first six months.
Next month’s relaunch of the Harry Potter series designed to tie in with the keenly-awaited movie of the final book is expected to drive sales, as is an “exceptionally” strong programme for its professional titles amid a raft of Government changes to tax rules.
Bloomsbury said: “Overall, business is performing well for the group.”
However, it stressed the full-year result was “still dependent on the level of consumer and business-to-business demand between now and the end of the financial year”.
The group reported a sharp fall in interim pre-tax profits to £949,000 against £1.8 million a year earlier after a tough second quarter, dominated by uncertainties surrounding the general election and emergency Budget.
Analysts at Numis Securities believe the final six months will counteract the drop, forecasting a 4% rise in annual pre-tax profits to £8 million.
They also put faith in Bloomsbury’s expansion plans, with the book publishers looking to take advantage of the rise in popularity of e-books, as well as further acquisitions in strategically important areas.
Numis analysts said: “We believe that the group is both well positioned to benefit from structural change in digital publishing and, in the short-term, an uplift in sales from film releases of Bloomsbury titles.”
By: executivepublisher,
on 10/14/2010
Blog:
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers Blog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Harpercollins,
book publishing,
Random House,
literary agent,
Barnes & Noble,
The Guardian,
Frankfurt Book Fair,
Harpercollins UK,
book publishers,
Transworld,
Schiel & Denver Authors,
Schiel And Denver,
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers,
book publishing companies,
book publishing company,
Chilean Miners Rescue,
Chile Miners,
chilean miners,
self-publishing,
Add a tag
The long ordeal of the 33 trapped Chilean miners is finally at an end – and the buzz about book deals and film rights to the men’s dramatic story has already begun.
The miners themselves are reported to have made a pact to collaborate on their own book, but in the UK the first book was signed up on Monday, before the rescue had even begun. Freelance journalist Jonathan Franklin, who has covered the dramatic story for the Guardian from day one, is to pen an account of the saga, provisionally titled 33 Men, for book publisher Transworld.
Franklin, who is an American but has lived in the Chile’s capital Santiago for 15 years, spoke about the book on his mobile phone from Chile, after 48 sleepless hours covering the emotional scenes as the miners emerged.
“This is one of the great rescue stories of all time,” he said, admitting he himself had wept as the first miners were released on Tuesday night. “It’s the reason we all want to be reporters: a remarkable story of the world coming together for a good reason. It taps into human altruism, the desire to work together, perseverance, faith that good things happen, never giving up.” The early chapters of the book, he said, were already written.
As a journalist, Franklin had had “a backstage pass to the whole thing. I was allowed to tape record the psychologist talking to the [trapped] men, I spent last night in the hospital talking to the [newly freed] miners.” He intends his book to reveal the characters of the miners themselves (“You could probably do a book on every one of them”) and reflect their black humour: one of the men played dead, for a joke, during the first 17 days spent in the collapsed mine without food, while another attempted phone sex with the nurse who was attending to him 700m above.
Transworld book publishers, a division of Random House, which bought 33 Men at last week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, said: “As far as I’m aware, Franklin is the only print and publishers journalist in the inner circle at the mine, party to a lot of the strategy and to the stories of the relatives at the top, the wives and girlfriends.” He added: “What I think is really interesting, apart from the drama of the story itself, is the miners’ lives in this isolated outpost in Chile, which is a bit like the Wild West. People seem to live by their own rules, and it’s a very rugged existence – tough people living in a tough place.”
The publication date for the book is still to be confirmed. “It’ll be sooner rather than later, but I don’t want Franklin to compromise the depth and breadth of the story by making it a rush job,” Scott-Kerr said.
Literary agent Annabel Merullo at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, who is handling the book, said it had also sold to France and Germany, with self publishing film interest from the US.
“It’s happened so quickly,” she said. “When the story broke, we talked about it at the agency and said, ‘Is there a book in it?’ We decided there only was if we could get someone really good to write it. Jonathan’s coverage was so much better than everyone else’s. He has incredible access at the mines and he’s covered the story from day one.”
By: executivepublisher,
on 10/10/2010
Blog:
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers Blog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
self-publishing,
Amazon,
booksellers,
book publishing,
Amazon Kindle,
The Guardian,
Mario Vargas Llosa,
Man Booker Prize,
book publishing industry,
Book Publishers,
Schiel and Denver,
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers,
book publishing companies,
book publishing company,
Man Book Prize,
Nobel Literature Prize,
Schiel & Denver,
Schiel & Denver Book Group,
Schiel & Denver Publishing Limited,
Shiel & Denver,
books,
Add a tag
The nights are drawing in and it’s book prize season – Nobel, Man Booker et al. This is the moment in the year, as the Flat draws to a close and as the National Hunt book publishing season gets into full swing, when literature becomes a horse race. That just might be the good news. John Steinbeck once observed that “the profession of book publishing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business”.
Many people who care about books are not so blithe. They worry that the turf accountants of our culture (tipsters who know the price of everything but the value of nothing) are reducing art to a crude cash value to publish a book. That’s one consequence of the credit crunch.
Every bookie is quoting literary odds now: Ladbrokes, William Hill, Paddy Power and Unibet are all at it. I can see some sense in giving the betting on Peter Carey or Howard Jacobson – they’re on a book publishers shortlist – but the whole point of the Nobel prize is that its shortlist is confidential. It beats me how anyone could come up with starting prices for it. According to its website, the Swedish academy makes its choice based on submissions from “professors of literature, book publishers and language, former Nobel laureates” and members of similar bodies, the Académie Française for example. The Swedes usually get about 350 nominations, all secret. How on earth can any bookie make sense of that?
Yet, such is the power of the market, and the importance of the prize, in a prize-conscious culture, that before the announcement of the great Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa as the long-overdue winner for 2010, both Ladbrokes and Unibet were quoting odds of Les Murray (8/1), AS Byatt (18/1), Vaclav Havel (35/1) and even Bob Dylan (150/1).
Mad as this seems, it is no more improbable than the founding of an important literary prize by a would-be poet who happened to invent dynamite. Alfred Nobel published a verse tragedy, Nemesis, inspired by Shelley’s The Cenci, just before his death in 1896.
Man Booker also has its roots in trade. Britain’s premier book prize was initially sponsored by a food conglomerate and is now backed by a hedge fund, the Man Group.
At this year’s Booker banquet in the Guildhall, there will be an awkward moment when a middle-aged bloke in a suit rehearses the trading achievements of his company to the assembled literati, makes a segue to his commitment to the arts and sits down to polite, slightly mystified, applause.
At such moments, it is hard not to recall Dr Johnson’s definition of the patron: “Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery.”
Under the coalition, it’s back to the 18th century. According to some, this is the worst crisis in books since Paternoster Row was destroyed in the Blitz in 1940. To paraphrase Macaulay, contemporary writers sometimes know luxury, and often face penury, but they never know comfort. Writers and self-publishing artists in austerity Britain will be grateful to sponsors such as Man and Costa.
The future may be Orange, but it’s hardly bright. The Arts Council, the British Council and the BBC, to name three traditional patrons, all face outright government hostility or death by a thousand cuts.
In this climate, writers may have to take their lead from George Gissing’s indigent hero Jasper Milvain who, more than 100 years ago, declared in New Grub Street: “I am the literary man (of 1882)… I a
By: executivepublisher,
on 10/6/2010
Blog:
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers Blog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
book publishing,
Book Expo America,
literary agent,
London Book Fair,
Frankfurt Book Fair,
Gutenberg Project,
Book Publishers,
global book shows,
Print On Demand Publishing,
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers,
book publishing companies,
Add a tag
Is it a book? Is it a film? Is it a game? Or all three? Publishers and authors at the world’s biggest book fair are battling to entice a new generation of readers with the latest multimedia products.
That the electronic book reader has turned the book publishers industry on its head is well known. Younger readers are no longer content to thumb through a printed book. The 21st century iPad generation wants interaction and variety.
But talk of the “ebook” that has dominated the Frankfurt Book Fair in recent years has given way in 2010 to excited chatter about the so-called “enhanced ebook”, a mixture of the traditional book, audio, video and game.
“In five years, books will be more often crossmedia products: with embedded sound, animated pictures, Internet links and … possible a gaming component, like alternative reality games,” said Juliane Schulze, from peacefulfish, a consultancy.
Some of the book world’s most celebrated names are already embracing the new format.
Ken Follett, one of the industry’s hottest authors, is expected to present a “multimedia-enhanced” version of his bestseller “The Pillars of the Earth” at this year’s fair.
At the touch of a screen, iPad readers of the “book” can see excerpts from the TV series based on the book, watch interviews with the author and actors and track interactions between characters on an “interactive character tree.”
This year’s fair has a special section devoted to digital, which Gottfried Honnefelder, president of the German book publishers and booksellers association, said could soon account for 10 percent of the market, from one percent today.
Qbend, a firm that helps publishers develop their digital offering, expects 42 percent annual growth for the ebook market between 2010 and 2012.
The enhanced ebook is mainly sold in the United States and Britain at the moment, but it is about to go global, said Andrew Weinstein, vice-president of US book wholesaler and distributor Ingram.
“While ebooks have not finished growing in the United States, they are set to explode in the global marketplace,” he said.
Cornelia Funke, one of Germany’s best-known authors of books for children, put it this way: “It all starts with a book. The love of reading starts, probably around the age of three, when you first pick up that favourite book.”
“In ten years time, that book may well be a screen.”
But the counter-revolution is already starting, with advocates of the traditional format saying that people like to have bound books as a keepsake, in the same way they print out and frame favourite photos from their cameras.
“Take the digital watch,” said Gordon Cheers, an Australian book publishers who presented what he said was the world’s biggest book at the fair — as far from a mobile multimedia offering as could be.
“In the 1980s, everyone said the digital watch would be the end of the traditional watchmaker. Sure, some did go out of business but then analogue watches came back and everyone these days wears one.
“The same will happen with the book. Leave it five or 10 years and books are bound to come back into fashion.”
Funke said: “I speak to loads of 16-year-olds who say they only read things on their electronic readers.”
“But then they tell me that, for the ones they really love, they go out and buy the book.”
Rumours of the death of the book have perhaps been greatly exaggerated.
By: executivepublisher,
on 10/5/2010
Blog:
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers Blog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
book publishing,
ebooks,
digital publishing,
ebook,
Barnes & Noble,
book publishing industry,
children's book publishers,
electronic publishing,
book publishing news,
book publishers,
Kobo,
book publishing companies,
book publishing company,
Add a tag
Michael Serbinis likes to think of himself as a David, but on this recent evening he looks more like a Steve — Steve Jobs to be exact.
It’s a rainy night in Toronto and about two dozen members of the city’s book publishing companies and media circles have gathered in a basement theatre at a swanky Yorkville hotel to hear from Mr. Serbinis, chief executive of Canada’s e-publishing startup, Kobo Inc.
As he stands at the front of the darkened theatre clutching a can of Red Bull, Mr. Serbinis is trying to do his best impression of the Apple Inc. CEO. There’s even an Applelike air of secrecy to the event, with everyone in attendance being asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement on the way down in the elevator.
In typical Steve Jobs fashion, at a methodical pace he walks the audience through a series of eye-popping stats to illustrate Kobo’s growth over its nine-month history before taking a few subtle digs at his competitors.
Finally, he tops it all off with the unveiling of a new product: Kobo’s new wireless eReader, the latest addition to the company’s arsenal in the battle for control over the exploding market for electronic books.
“I know what you’re thinking, ‘Now I have to sign an NDA to go to a Kobo event? What is this, Fight Club?’ ” he says with a laugh. “Well, when you’re David and you’re fighting Goliath, every day feels like Fight Club.”
The Goliaths of which Mr. Serbinis speaks are indeed the titans of the technology industry and present a formidable challenge for the young company. Kobo’s eReaders and digital bookstore compete with Amazon.comInc.’s Kindle reader, digital offerings from Google Inc. and, of course, the iPad and iBookstore operated by Apple. But so far, Kobo is holding its own. Since launching in December, Kobo has attracted more than a million users to its service. Each week, its applications, which run across multiple smartphones, on book publisher websites and various e-readers and tablets, are accessed from more than 200 countries. There are now more than 2.2 million digital books available in the Kobo store. Its eReaders are sold in bookstores across North America and around the world.
When the company, which is privately run and does not publish financial details, launched it had just 20 employees; by the end of this year, Kobo’s head count will be close to 200, said Mr. Serbinis, who allows that net revenue is growing at between 300% and 500% per quarter.
What separates Kobo, whose parent company, Indigo Books & Music Inc., owns 60% of the Toronto startup, from its competitors is its singular focus on digital books and digital books alone, Mr. Serbinis said in an interview.
Unlike Amazon, the company doesn’t sell physical products — except its eReaders — and its devices aren’t multi-purpose machines such as Apple iPads.
“We’re the only pure play that’s in this game and from the very beginning we’ve focused on being global, being open and being the best partner for all the device manufacturers for booksellers,” he said. “Those three things combined with the fact that the market has just exploded, that’s a recipe for massive growth and scale.”
Digital books aren’t a new business, but the increasingly popularity of smartphones, tablet devices and Web-enabled e-readers such as Sony Corp.’s Reader — all of which support Kobo’s e-book store– is beginning to prompt book lovers to think about going paperless.
Sales of electronic books are rising at such a breakneck pace that they’re beginning to take a significant bite out of traditional and self publishing revenues. Mr. Serbinis said that when the company launched, it
